Voting Rights Act Enforcement Increases Turnout

Inequities are a persistent feature of U.S. elections. As our colleagues have documented, the gap in voter participation between white and Black Americans has increased since the Supreme Court, through its 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, removed key protections in the Voting Rights Act. One of the law’s remaining safeguards, Section 2, prohibits any electoral practice that dilutes the voting strength of a racial or ethnic group. By analyzing successful Section 2 challenges that resulted in new majority-Black districts in the 2024 election, we find that appropriate enforcement of the Voting Rights Act to address cases of race discrimination increases participation among Black registered voters and reduces the racial turnout gap.

In Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana, courts ordered new maps to be drawn after finding that the previous district plans violated Section 2 by diluting the voting power of Black voters. These maps created a new majority-Black district in each state for the 2024 election. Notably, the remedial district plan drawn in Alabama is the first to feature two majority-Black districts in the state’s history.

The creation of majority-Black districts is crucial to giving Black Americans the equal opportunity to elect a candidate of their preference. Black voters nationally, and in these three states, have turnout rates that trail those of white voters due to a plethora of reasons, including voter ID and other restrictive laws, inaccessible polling places, high rates of incarceration, and political disaffection stemming from historical legacies of oppression and disenfranchisement.

While research from the 1990s on minority-opportunity districts did not find consistent turnout effects, more recent analysis from 2016 takes advantage of larger datasets (like state voter registration rolls) to show that Black turnout increases as the Black share of the district population increases.

Using voter registration data in Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana for the 2024 election, we find that being drawn into a majority-Black district increased Black participation by up to six percentage points and reduced the white–Black turnout gap by two to four points. 

The creation of additional majority-Black congressional districts in the three states studied is a consequence of extended litigation.

Although Black people make up more than 25 percent of Alabama’s population, the state legislature drew only one of its seven congressional districts (14 percent) to have a majority-Black population following the first round of redistricting in 2022. This map packed Black voters into the majority-Black Seventh Congressional District, picking up people from Birmingham and outside Montgomery, while splitting Black communities in the southern region of the state between the First and Second Congressional Districts, where they would be unable to elect a representative of their choice. In this map, based on data from the post-2024 voter file, the Seventh District was 60.8 percent Black, while the First and Second Districts were 26.1 and 30.9 percent Black, respectively. About one-third of the Black population in the state resided in the Seventh District.

Voters challenged this map in court, arguing that it illegally diluted Black citizens’ voting power. A district court blocked the map and ordered the state to redraw boundaries to create two majority-Black districts, but the U.S. Supreme Court paused this order to preserve the original map for the 2022 elections.

In June 2023, in a 5–4 decision in Allen v. Milligan, the Supreme Court affirmed the district court’s order to create a second majority-Black district. The opinion specifically affirmed the application of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to the facts of the case. In defiance of the order, the state legislature passed, and the governor signed into effect, a new map with only one majority-Black district and another district with a Black voting-age population of just under 40 percent.

Following the Supreme Court’s rejection of Alabama’s pleas to preserve its map, a court-appointed special master drew new maps for the 2024 election. On October 5 a federal court adopted a new congressional map in which the Second and Seventh Congressional Districts were both majority-Black districts. The Second Congressional District took in some of the population from the previous First, Second, and Seventh Districts in order to create a majority-Black district spanning the southern tier of the state from Barbour and Russell Counties in the east to Washington County and portions of Mobile County, including some of the city of Mobile, in the southwest part of the state.

Louisiana faced a similarly prolonged battle to draw a second majority-Black district. After the 2020 redistricting cycle, only one of the state’s six districts (17 percent) was drawn to be a majority-Black district, although the Black population constituted more than 30 percent of Louisiana’s voting-age population. Black voters challenged the congressional map as a violation of Section 2. A district court ordered the state to adopt a new map, and the state appealed.

The Fifth Circuit affirmed the district court’s ruling, and in January 2024 the map was redrawn to create a second majority-Black district. The legislature drew a new Sixth Congressional District from Baton Rouge in the southeast to Shreveport in the northwest of the state, linking portions of Alexandria and Natchitoches Parishes along Interstate 49. With borders running through the center of the state, the new district incorporated communities from every district except the First. About half the population came from the Fourth and Sixth Districts crafted in the 2022 statewide plan.

Days later, white voters started a new wave of litigation, arguing that this district was created as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. In April 2024, a three-judge panel struck down the map; the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the ruling pending appeal, meaning the map with two Black congressional districts will continue to be used until the Court makes a final decision. It will hear a challenge to the current congressional district map on March 24.

In Georgia, the fight to add a new majority-Black district was more straightforward but had mixed results. In response to a court order invalidating the 2022 district map, the state legislature eliminated a multiracial district (where no single group was a majority) in the Atlanta suburbs in order to create a new majority-Black district. It opted to adjust the lines of the Seventh Congressional District, which was already about one-third Black and represented by Lucy McBath in Congress. The rest of the state, outside of the Atlanta metropolitan area, was largely unchanged by the remedial redistricting process.

The court denied the plaintiffs’ motion to block the map for the 2022 election, but in 2023 a federal judge ruled that the map violated the Voting Rights Act and ordered the legislature to create a new majority-Black district for the 2024 election. New maps were in place for the 2024 election, though litigation related to the congressional district plan is ongoing.

We used the first voter registration file available after the 2024 election for our analyses. We relied on voters’ self-reported race to calculate turnout as a function of ballots cast among Black registrants in each congressional district in these three states.

We first looked at the congressional districts in these states to see if turnout was higher among Black registrants living in majority-Black districts (i.e., the Second and Seventh Districts in Alabama; the Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Thirteenth Districts in Georgia; and the Second and Sixth Districts in Louisiana) than it was among Black registrants living elsewhere in the state.

In the 2024 general election, turnout among Black registrants in Alabama and Louisiana was about two percentage points higher than turnout among Black registrants in the other districts in these states. The results in Georgia point in the opposite direction — albeit just slightly. Turnout among Black registrants in the five majority-Black districts in the new congressional map was about one-fifth of a point lower than elsewhere in the state.

These divergent results may reflect the fact that the remedial district plans in Alabama and Louisiana created new majority-Black districts, whereas the Georgia remedial map shifted Black registrants into an Atlanta-area district that already had a majority non-white population. These results show an association between turnout and the Black population in these congressional districts, but they do not prove that the remedial maps themselves increased participation among Black registrants.

To determine whether the new majority-Black districts increased turnout, we focused only on the registrants who, because of the remedial redistricting, were drawn into one of these majority-Black districts and compared the turnout rate among this population to the rate among registrants drawn into another district in the state. The proportion of registrants drawn into a majority-Black district was almost 9 percent in Georgia, about 17 percent in Alabama, and 20 percent in Louisiana.

This analysis omitted registrants who were already in a majority-Black district prior to the remedial process. As a result, we were able to measure the effect of being moved into a majority-Black district by comparing turnout rates with the baseline turnout among a similar population that was not drawn into a majority-Black district. Importantly, turnout between these two groups was statistically indistinguishable prior to 2024.

Here the results are positive in each state. Being drawn into a majority-Black district increased turnout by about three-quarters of a percentage point in Alabama, about six points in Georgia, and about two points in Louisiana. All of these results are statistically significant. Said differently, drawing these new majority-Black districts increased participation in the 2024 election by between 2,000 and 5,000 Black voters in each of these states.

We can also think of this boost in participation among Black registrants in terms of the persistent racial turnout gap. In all three states, the turnout gap between white and Black registrants who were drawn into a majority-Black district was smaller than the gap between those drawn into another district — by two percentage points in Alabama (where the statewide gap was larger than at any point since at least 2008), three and a half points in Louisiana, and almost four points in Georgia. These results are also statistically significant. The creation of majority-Black districts, then, is one of the means to improve the participatory deficit in U.S. elections.

The remedial congressional redistricting in Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana allowed us to investigate the connection between the protections included in Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and participation in the 2024 election. We find that enforcing these safeguards increased participation by Black registrants.

Litigation in these states has not ended. In Georgia, advocates are now challenging the state’s remedial map as an imperfect remedy to the underlying vote dilution that prompted the original litigation. The three-judge panel in Alabama is considering arguments to reinstate the 2022 map with only one majority-Black district. And the U.S. Supreme Court will ultimately decide which map will be in place in Louisiana for the 2026 elections. Protecting the ability of voters of color to elect candidates of their choice, through the drawing of minority-opportunity districts, increases turnout in elections.